Princes of the Church brings together the latest research exploring the importance of bishops’ palaces for social and political history, landscape history, architectural history and archaeology. It is the first book-length study of such sites since Michael Thompson’s Medieval Bishops’ Houses (1998), and the first work ever to adopt such a wide-ranging approach to them in terms of themes and geographical and chronological range.
Including contributions from the late Antique period through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it deals with bishops’ residences in England, Scotland, Wales, the Byzantine Empire, France, and Italy. It is structured in three sections: design and function, which considers how bishops’ palaces and houses differed from the palaces and houses of secular magnates, in their layout, design, furnishings, and functions; landscape and urban context, which considers the relationship between bishops’ palaces and houses and their political and cultural context, the landscapes and towns or cities in which they were set, and the parks, forests, and towns that were planned and designed around them; and architectural form, which considers the extent of shared features between bishops’ palaces and houses, and their relationship to the houses of other Church potentates and to the houses of secular magnates.
List of figures
List of plates
Preface
Chapter 1 Introduction: Researching the Palaces of Princes of the Church , David Rollason
PART I: PROJECTING IMAGES OF POWER
Chapter 2 Thomas Wolsey as the Ideal Cardinal and his Palace of Hampton Court, Margaret Harvey
Chapter 3 Late Antique Episcopal Complexes: Bishop Eufrasius and his Residence at Poreč (Croatia), Jaqueline P. Sturm
Chapter 4 The Political and Cultural Significance of the Bishop's Palace in Medieval Italy, Maureen C. Miller
Chapter 5 ‘A Mere Domestic Life’: Catherine Talbot in the Georgian Episcopal Home, Michael Ashby
Chapter 6 Auckland Castle in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: the Palace and Princely Power, Ria Snowdon
Chapter 7 Bishops’ Residences, Saints’ Cults, and the Legacy of Sacred Authority in the Medieval Dioceses of St Andrews and Glasgow, Penelope Dransart
PART II: PALACES, FORESTS, AND PARKS
Chapter 8 Pre-Conquest Regalian Roots of Episcopal Forests and Chases, Graham Jones
Chapter 9 English bishops’ Hunting Rights, Hunts, and Hunting Grounds, John Langton
Chapter 10 Deer Parks and Masculine Egos: Knights, Priors, and Bishops in the Medieval North of England, Andrew G. Miller
Chapter 11 The Bishop of Durham's Park at Auckland Castle in the Middle Ages, J. Linda Drury
PART III: PALACES AND THE WORK OF THE BISHOP
Chapter 12 English Bishops’ Itineraries, c. 700-c. 1200, Julia Barrow
Chapter 13 How to Travel with a Bishop: Thirteenth-Century Episcopal Itineraries, Philippa M. Hoskin
Chapter 14 Bishops’ houses in medieval London, John Schofield
Chapter 15 Why so Many Houses? The Varied Functions of the Episcopal Residences of the See of Winchester, c.1130-c.1680 439, John Hare
Chapter 16 Evidence Regarding Bishops’ Use of Hall and Chamber in Later Thirteenth-Century England, with Observations Regarding Notarial Influence, Michael Burger
Chapter 17 The Gatehouse and Precincts of the Bishop’s Palace at Exeter, Richard Parker
PART IV: DESIGN, FUNCTION, AND DECORATION
Chapter 18 Ubi papa ibi Roma: the Bishop of Rome’s Residence in the Fourteenth Century: Avignon, Gottfried Kerscher
Chapter 19 Exeter Bishop’s Palace, Stuart Blaylock
Chapter 20 En Route and in Residence: Integrating Documentary and Archaeological Evidence for the Itineraries and Residences of the Medieval Bishops of Durham, Caroline Smith and C. Pamela Graves, with Matt Claydon, and Mark Randerson
Chapter 21 Auckland and Durham Castles in the Eighteenth Century, Richard Pears
Chapter 22 Bishop Hurd’s Library at Hartlebury Castle, Christine Penney
Chapter 23 Auckland and Durham Castles in John Cosin’s Time, Adrian Green
Chapter 24 Bishop Hugh of Le Puiset’s Great Hall at Auckland Castle: Its Place in English Twelfth-Century Architecture, Malcolm Thurlby
Chapter 25 St Davids Bishop’s Palace and its Remarkable Roofscape, Rick Turner
References
I. Original Sources and Abbreviations
II. Secondary Sources
Index
Biography
David Rollason studied for his first degree at Balliol College, Oxford, where he sat at the feet particularly of J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Peter Brown, and Henry Mayr-Harting; then for his PhD at the University of Birmingham, under the supervision of Wendy Davies and R. H. C. Davis, and – informally – of Philip Rahtz. After a year at the Collẻge de France, supervised by Georges Duby, he was appointed lecturer in history at the University of Durham in 1977. He retired in 2010 and remains Emeritus Professor, his most recent publication being The Power of Place: Rulers and Their Palaces, Landscapes, Cities, and Holy Places (2016) – the outcome of his 2010-13 Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship.
